Nvidia dominates the AI chips market. Now its biggest customers want a piece of the action

Nvidia has owned the AI hardware market for years. Six tech giants are racing to escape its grip at wildly different speeds

I-Hwa Cheng / AFP via Getty Images

Six companies are trying to build their own AI chips and loosen Nvidia $NVDA's grip on the chip market. Google $GOOGL and Amazon $AMZN are already shipping theirs at scale. Microsoft $MSFT and Meta $META are just now getting their own chips into production. OpenAI and Tesla $TSLA are only at the design stage, lagging their competitors by years rather than months.

Each company has picked a different partner and a different timeline to close the gap. Google designs its chips with Broadcom $AVGO, a chip design and networking company, and manufactures them at TSMC $TSM, the Taiwanese company that makes chips for nearly every firm on this list. Tesla is the outlier, betting on a chip plant of its own instead of a place in TSMC's line.

Nvidia's current market position gives it leverage. Bloomberg Intelligence projects the company will hold 70% to 75% of the AI chip market through 2030. That dominance is what's pushing companies to spend billions designing custom chips instead.

The companies already shipping chips

Google is seven generations deep into its custom AI chip program. The company announced its newest version, called Ironwood, earlier this year. Ironwood is built for inference — the work of running an already trained AI model — and Google can already link up to 9,216 Ironwood chips into a single........

© Quartz